THE JUSTIFIED THIEF

I was robbed of my treasure. I pursued and caught up with the thief yet, I could not retrieve my treasure. He squandered it as he fled. I looked straight into his eyes and asked, “Why do this to me? Why steal and squander my treasure?”

He grinned ominously exposing his hidden deadly shark-like dentine. In the next minute his countenance had changed. I could swear I saw lightning in his eyeballs. Then he spoke effusing smoke. Yes, thick dark smoke that burnt my eyes and irritated my ears that I could barely hear.

“How could that be a treasure? You left it unkept and untended like it was unwanted. How on earth could you call that ‘your’ treasure? I didn’t steal your treasure. I only took what wasn’t important to you because to me, it’s a plaything; a toy that gives me delight.” He grinned again. Then in a big puff of dark smoke, he disappeared.

I’m not narrating a nightmare I had. Neither am I relating a true life incidence literally. I’m just  sharing a fiction from my wild imaginations. I know you just asked why anyone in his right mind would imagine himself in such a frightful scenario. That other person reading just prayed, “God forbid evil. May I not be robbed of my treasure (either in Jesus’ name or Insha Allah).”

Well, I’m in my right senses and I don’t wish myself or you, my reader, evil. But all of us are robbed, not one time, but from time to time by this horrible thief in my imagination. He steals the same thing from everyone of us. He treats us the same way – laughing at us after stealing our most valuable treasure as men and women of vision and noble mission.

The greatest enigma about him is that he doesn’t sneak in. He isn’t ever surreptitious. We open the door for him willingly and wittingly allow him to gain grounds. We roll our treasure around before him; kicking and frolicking with it like it means absolutely nothing. We use our treasure like we use rain water at the peak of the rainy season. We throw it to our ‘frenemy’ to play with. We act like a pregnant woman who loaned a barren friend her coital canal.

How more justified can this thief be when eventually he makes away with our treasure? Haven’t we, with our own hands, offered it to him on a platter of folly? Think about it, friend. How readily and willingly we allow procrastination to steal our precious time from us. Yes. Our ‘frenemy’ the thief is PROCRASTINATION and our treasure, our TIME. Don’t the wise say that procrastination is the thief of time? If only procrastination could make a justification case for itself, would we ever be able to prove it wrong? We invite it. We condone it. And it punishes us for our negligence.

Now that you know that procrastination is a wicked, merciless monster that can justifiably rob you of your most valuable treasure, I beseech you, dear friend, to constantly shut it out and jealously guard your treasure as you use it wisely. May your today be better than your yesterday and may your tomorrow always be better than your today.

If you’ve learnt something, then don’t hesitate to teach us something too as you leave a comment.

SCHOOLING FOR TOOLING (1)

For the literary experts who may find themselves reading this blog, I humbly say, concerning the title, “no pun intended”. For those who are less concerned about lexicology, what you read as the title is exactly what I intended – getting schooled so as to be ‘entooled’. (Apologies to the lexicologists again).

Almost every dictionary I consulted defined ‘schooling’,  for humans, as ‘education and/or training as obtained from schools’. The emphasis became necessary when I discovered that animals too could be ‘schooled’, though outside the classrooms.

Paraphrasing now, schooling should be about getting education from schools.

I know what you are thinking! What is education? Right?

 Dictionary.com defines education as the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

Many other books and authors also define education along the line of knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing via reasoning and judgment and knowledge application to problem solving and general life improvement.

But looking at the educational system in Nigeria in the last two decades, one cannot see even a mere semblance of the aforementioned description given to education.

Besides poor and, in some cases, complete lack of educational infrastructure, the attitude of Nigerians and our government towards the true, core value of knowledge is grossly unbecoming. We go to school for the simple and mundane purpose of getting a fanciful piece of paper glorified as a Certificate; when the certified is never certain of what to do with the outcome of his 4+x years of studying and writing exams in a university.

Since all that matters to a potential employer is the grade on a graduate’s certificate in the present day Nigeria, a typical undergraduate learns to spend the last few weeks or even days of the semester cramming all that he can only to pour it in the examiner’s answer book and wait for the result. If he is a good ‘crammer’, wholaaa! He scores an ‘A’ or a ‘B’.

Did I forget to mention that the scenario above only applies to an honest, above-average student? Oh! A ‘sharp’ student may actually not need those qualities and need not undergo that level of stress. All he needs is his fat purse, a lecturer that ‘understands’ and, in some cases, an intermediary between the examiners and their ‘examinees’. In this case, the ‘A’ have been found to come with higher degrees of certainty than in the previous scenario because it has a quantifiable price.

However, in both cases, what I call ‘residual knowledge’ is near-zero after the semester.

This shoddy educational pattern cuts across the entire tiers of schooling in the country – primary, secondary, tertiary and even post-graduate levels. Parents and teachers aid their children/pupils in exam malpractices at primary and secondary levels and students and lecturers team up to commit academic atrocities in our tertiary schools. Even doctorate degrees are questionable these days. Someone once gave a mock meaning of PhD as ‘Politics’, ‘hardwork’ and ‘Dobale’. Dobale means ‘to prostrate’. It wasn’t difficult for me to see that even the ‘hardwork’ part of the mock meaning is the only word that begins with a small letter. Can we really argue if someone concludes that ‘hardwork’ is the least important item among the identified three? Even the ‘dobale’ starts with a capital ‘D’ – P h D indeed.

There is a huge disconnect between knowledge acquisition and application in our society. A young Nigerian today doesn’t go to school to be shaped into a tool. Oladele Afolabi is a seasoned technology policy expert and strategist. He commented that “we tend to have lost the real essence of schooling and education.” We really need to understand the value of knowledge. This will automatically affect our approach to its acquisition, application and appreciation.

To be continued.

God bless Nigeria.

WHILE WE ARE HERE…

Kenny is my friend – a very intelligent high flyer for our age. He usually has answers to questions young men of his age would naturally evade. So it was just natural for me to direct my question to him.  “What primarily are we meant to do….I mean WHILE we are here on earth? I desire a simple one-statement answer.”

Kenny, my friend, provided an answer though he missed my question. He thought I said “why we are here” when actually I said “while we are here”. His answer to the presumed question is a topic for another day but the answer we both got from an elderly friend forms the basis for this write-up.

What single sentence or statement describes what we are meant to do as living citizens of the world? I got a two-worded answer. Stunningly succinct and aptly exhaustive.

“Make choices”.

Yes. All a man seems to do once he can differentiate between his right and left is to make choices. And this he does till he bids the world farewell. The first five letters of the English alphabet summarily describes the entire journey of man and puts the letter C at the centre. At the centre of our total existence are the choices we make. You may have a look at this:

                A – Ante-datum

                B – Birth

                C – Choices

                D – Death

                E – Eternity

Limiting our analysis to our earthly sojourn, the journey becomes as simple as BCD. Starting with your birth (B) and ending with your death (D). All you do between birth and death is to make millions of choices (C). Whatever happens to you between the two major milestones of birth and death is directly related to the choices you make.

Need I say that your eternity also has a direct link with your choices too?

Making choices is synonymous to picking the tools for our life’s kit bags. You pick them right, your journey is less strenuous and more enjoyable. You do otherwise, your journey becomes hell and may even end abruptly….sadly.

I deem it fit to make this topic my very first discussion in this blog due to its significant place in the affairs of men. The choices we make eventually make or mar us. What and what can help us in making the right choices? I await your suggestions.

WELCOME

You are welcome to this page. My name is Olumide and I am a Nigerian deeply concerned with making my country a better place than it is today and helping her people, myself inclusive, live a better life than they are forced to live at the moment. This page is one of the efforts I am making to pursue this dream so I gladly welcome you as we juxtapose ideas towards achieving the noble goal of helping ourselves and others achieve as much happiness as we all can in a peaceful, egalitarian society.

Ideas, incontrovertibly, rule the world! That is why this platform is desired to be a breeding ground for ideas that can touch and change lives. It is never intended to be a page where someone dishes out a weekly monologue of personal idiosyncrasies and polarized opinions. Rather, it is meant to be a melting pot of thoughts, opinions, concepts and moves from which a mélange of refreshing and invigorating recipes can be dished out to Nigerians and other citizens of the world.

I, therefore, thank you for coming on board this impact-making, result-focused project via which we all can sow seeds of greatness into lives. Lives that will bring forth fruits of peace, industry and true transformation to our nation. God bless Nigeria and bless us all.

Olumide Akintayo Fadakinte

+234(0)703-866-7687